CCBN Streams Ahead of the Pack
By Matt Stump
from the June 18, 2001 issue of Broadband Week
The financial services industry is an early adopter of streaming technology, and one of the leaders in that space, CCBN, expects to deliver an increasing amount of rich audio and videostreaming in the next few years.
"Currently, less than 5 percent of CCBN's client base elect to webcast their events in video," says Greg Radner, director of marketing at CCBN. But companies are already going beyond the standard audio-only conference call, he says.
One growing trend in 2001 is companies presenting synchronized slides with audio webcasts. "One year ago, less than 5 percent of CCBN's clients utilized the webconferencing technology," Radner says. "Now 25 percent to 30 percent of CCBN clients are currently utilizing live audio with synchronized slides." And over the next year, Radner expects 10 percent to 15 percent of CCBN clients will add video to their analysts/annual meetings.
CCBN was formed in 1997 to manage and host investor relations segments of public company Web sites. It counts 2,500 clients and handled more than 3,000 conference call Webcasts in first quarter 2001.
Akamai Technologies and Genuity are among CCBN's chief technology partners. Akamai dials in to each CCBN conference and retrieves the audio, video and rich media for distribution across its worldwide network. Akamai encodes the content into either the Real Player or Windows Media Player format, delivers it across its network to edge servers and provides activity reporting back to CCBN. Genuity is CCBN's primary network and Web hosting provider for CCBN investor relations web sites.
Radner sales the high cost of hosting a videostreaming conference call ($20,000 to $25,000), is the chief reason more video isn't streamed today. But just as synchronized slides increases the content ante this year, Radner feels video will follow suit over the next two to three years, growing 5 percent to 10 percent annually.
In addition, some 30 percent of CCBN's first quarter webcasts were for nonearning events, such as guidance updates, product announcements, broker conference presentations and annual meetings. That's up from 17 percent in first quarter 2000, Radner says.
Enhanced audio features, such as guestbook registration, pre-event page and user-controlled PowerPoint slides, jumped from 26 percent in fourth quarter 2000 to 47 percent in first quarter 2001, Radner says. And the average call length has jumped from 56 minutes in July 2000 to 72 minutes in January.
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